Reflecting on life

“A life well lived is hard to find.”

A seventy year old man is sitting in his living room. He turns on the tv and sits on his couch. He begins to reflect on his life as he just retired recently. As a high school English teacher, he remembered a prompt he used to make his students think and they would discuss the results. He never thought about it until now. “A life well lived is hard to find…………” he couldn’t help but say it out loud. He repeated the phrase a few times and began to think deeply about it. He remembered many of the answers that his students gave him when he would ask “What does this mean?”. They would usually talk about their life goals, friends and family and overall being happy.

He had his students write an essay on what this meant to them. He very much enjoyed reading the responses and many of his students said they enjoyed the assignment as there were no right or wrong answers. It was graded for completion.

When he graded these essays, he would give his students feedback and his thoughts on their ideas.

A big part of this discussion was to reflect on major life events such as visiting a different country for the first time, accomplishing goals, meeting new people, trying a new hobby.

They would then discuss how these all worked out. He very much welcomed negative answers as not everything always works out. He would explain to his students that making mistakes is a big part of learning. The biggest mistake is to take nothing away from an experience.

He began to reminisce about the big events in his life. Traveling across the world when he was in his early 30’s, the day he met his wife, his first son being born, when his first grandchild was born, starting and finishing college, moving out of the house after finishing his education, meeting life-long friends, various times with his college mentor and his first and last days of teaching.

He then recalled a few negative events in his life. Losing his friends to old age, a car accident that left him in the hospital and in physical and emotional therapy for a year, some students he felt that he could not help, no matter how hard he tried, losing a job when he was eighteen, an abusive relationship that ended very very badly when he was in college.

Solely for the purpose of discussion, he told them to think about it now and to think about it again when you’re 70 and compare your results. This would lead to a discussion about how your priorities change as you get older. He used the examples of when he was a child he only wanted to have fun and didn't have a care in the world, when he was in middle school, he solely wanted to fit in, during high school, he only wanted to hang out with friends. Once he got to college, he was focused on obtaining a wide variety of experiences while learning as much as he possibly could and once he graduated, he had three goals: have a family, travel the world and begin his career.

He began to miss his students as he had been teaching for almost fifty years.

While his students have most likely forgotten about this simple homework assignment, he couldn’t forget about it even if he wanted to. He very much enjoyed thinking about this phrase. It was a part of him.

After many years he finally asked himself “Was MY life well lived?”